Modernism is not a rejection of the mass culture but rather an effort to produce a mass culture, perhaps for the first time, to produce a culture distinctive to the twentieth century, which Le Bon called “the era of the crowds.’ The conservatives who followed him, developed a different ideas of the relation between the aristocracy that built culture and the masses. Yeats viewed the theatre as a potential means of mobilizing and nationalizing the masses, something he recognized any successful nationalism in the age of mass politics must do. His wish to nationalize the masses led him to cast the playwright and stage as magicians with the power to transform the audience as Cathleen transforms Michael in Cathleen Ni Houlihan. Le Bon’s vision is very similar to Pound’s and Yeats’s: they all defined the goal of social change and of their art as the producing of a deep wave from the unconscious. Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” is about a crowd. A wet, black bough is a restored cultural center that will hold together the chaotic small waves now agitating society. Modernism was an effort to write based the unconscious mass.

• 서혜숙(건국대) | Hye Shook Suh